.KEYWORD copilot
.FLYINGHEAD EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEEK
.TITLE CoPilot for the Auto PC
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Our Auto PC expert, Mark Moeller, is back with a fascinating preview of an upcoming product called CoPilot, a turn-by-turn navigation system. According to Moeller, this product is hot. Read all about it in this exclusive sneak peek.
.AUTHOR Mark Moeller
In last month’s article I did a survey of products currently available for the Auto PC. This month I want to spotlight a soon-to-be-released product for the Auto PC, CoPilot from Travroute (at http://www.travroute.com).
For those of you familiar with navigation software for the PC, CoPilot is a familiar name. It’s designed to run on a notebook computer, optionally equipped with a GPS, to provide turn-by-turn navigation as you drive. It has a speech driven user interface to enable safe driving while navigating. If you get off route, it quickly recalculates updated driver directions for you, and all the streets in the US fit on one CD-ROM. It has won many awards as well-regarded navigation software on a PC. Users give it a big "thumbs up" too, as evidenced by reading stories from users on TravRoute’s Web site.
Now a full-featured version of this product is about to be released for the Auto PC! It”s slated to ship on September 15th. I have obtained the latest beta copy of the product and installed it on my Auto PC. My initial reaction is that this product will be true to its PC-based relatives and garner praises from users and reviewers alike.
.H1 Installation
Installation is simple: just insert the program’s CD into the Auto PC’s CD-ROM drive and installation automatically starts. You are walked through a series of steps to install the software, train some new voice commands, and install a patch to the Auto PC’s serial driver. It turns out that the serial driver on the Auto PC had some buffer overflow problems under heavy computing loads that would confuse the GPS. This patch fixes that problem.
Once installed you can start CoPilot by voice or using the Start button on the Auto PC. Note that if your Auto PC has more than a few new programs installed on it, you will need to go into the Setup program of the Auto PC, choose the Speech Commands menu item, then the Global Commands menu item, then select which of up to ten programs you want to start by voice.
For instance, since CoPilot effectively replaces the Directions application on the Auto PC, you could choose to not be able to voice activate Directions anymore, but instead CoPilot. Does this sound sort of confusing? Well, it is until you understand that the Auto PC allows you to choose up to ten words that it will recognize in what is called the "Global Grammar". These are the words that the Auto PC will recognize right after you say "Auto PC" or press the push to talk button. The reason it is limited to ten words is that the more words the Auto PC must recognize at any one time, the greater the chance of a misrecognition. To reduce this problem, Microsoft chose to limit the user to ten words.
Once CoPilot is started, it gives a friendly welcome announcement using the text-to-speech system. After a moment, it states your current location and that it’s ready to escort you to a new destination. CoPilot obtains your current location from the optional GPS receiver Clarion sells for their AutoPC. CoPilot appears to require a GPS, and this makes sense. Without a GPS, CoPilot would be functionally reduced to the Directions application that comes standard on the Auto PC.
.H1 Selecting a destination
To select a destination CoPilot allows you to choose from several sources: A street address, cross street, point of interest, the Auto PC address book, a Favorites list, a destination transmitted via infrared from an H/PC or P/PC address book, or the Pocket Streets program. Selecting a destination is definitely something you should do with your vehicle parked. It involves traversing some menus, entering text and reading the screen. I find address book the easiest to use but just entering a street address is pretty painless.
When entering an address you will be prompted for a city or zip code. If you enter a city, CoPilot’s search for your destination address can be considerably longer than if you specify a zip code. You can enter partial city names and CoPilot will bring up a list to choose from which can reduce time entering an address. Once the destination is selected, CoPilot does some work then prompts you to hit Enter to get directions. This allows you to go back and reenter an address if they made a mistake before computing the route of travel. Hit Enter and about 30 to 60 seconds later, CoPilot has computed a route to your destination.
.H1 Road trip
Once you have pressed Enter and the route is calculated, CoPilot automatically comes up and reads you the first maneuver of your route. If you want to review the route, it has computed for you before you start, you can hit the pound (i.e., "#") key and review the directions step by step before you begin your journey.
During your journey you can view your route in one of two ways, turn-by-turn or moving map mode. Turn-by-turn shows you the upcoming maneuver and how far it is until you need to make that maneuver. As you approach the maneuver, CoPilot anticipates the upcoming maneuver and speaks the instructions to you. It also tells you approximately how far you have to go, in hundereds of feet, until the maneuver must be executed. An alternative view is moving map mode. This draws a map of the area you are travelling in on the Auto PC’s display, as well as an indication of where your vehicle is on the map, and the next maneuver you must execute. It also warns of approaching maneuvers and gives instructions on what maneuver to perform.
dDrive-time feedback is where CoPilot really shines. Even though CoPilot uses only GPS in identifying your vehicle’s location, it uses a proprietary map-matching algorithm, which locates the vehicle on the map with impeccable accuracy. I prefer using CoPilot in moving map mode and was totally amazed at how it was able to locate my vehicle accurately even on closely spaced roads. Given that all consumer-level GPS systems can report location with an error of over a 1000 feet, I expected CoPilot to make mistakes as to which street I was on when driving though convoluted residential housing developments. But, much to my surprise, I could not get CoPilot confused as to my location. This bit of software genius is the work of TravRoute’s Per Kreipke and Mike Bodden.
Another area in which CoPilot shines during drive time is route recalculation. Imagine you are driving along and CoPilot suggests that you make a right hand turn. However, the street that you would be turning onto is closed due to roadwork so you have to drive past the street. Within a few hundred feet CoPilot figures out that you’re off route and immediately calculates a new route for you to get to your appointed destination. This takes only a few seconds instead of the original 30 to 60 seconds when the route was first calculated.
This can be a real frustration saver when you are driving through areas with congestion that you want to avoid or lots of roadwork. It also helps when you simply just miss a maneuver. A nice touch that CoPilot has in moving map display mode is that the level of detail on the map changes depending on how fast you are driving. The faster you go, the less detail you get. It allows you to focus on your intended route of travel, which is highlighted in a bright color on the map, at a glance. When you slow down the detail increases greatly so you can see the side streets and easily get a visual correlation between your physical location on the road and the position of your vehicle on the moving map.
Once you have executed all your driving maneuvers and have arrived at your destination, CoPilot announces your arrival and is ready to start navigating a new route. CoPilot saves your recently selected destinations in its "Favorites" list of destinations for quick selection in the future.
.H1 CoPilot’s future improvements
One feature that wasn’t complete yet, but should be awesome when it’s finished, is CoPilot’s integration with the Messages application on the Auto PC. When finished, CoPilot will extract traffic congestion information from the Traffic folder of the messages application and apply that information when calculating your travel routes. Using this, CoPilot will route you around traffic problems that have been reported in your area. This sort of integration, if it works up to expectations, will cause the Auto PC with CoPilot to be a real winner.
TravRoute is also working on polishing the user interface of CoPilot to be Auto PC compliant and to make use of speech as much as is practical. UI (user interface) consistency on the Auto PC is far more important than on a PC because changes in UI paradigm between applications distract the user. Requiring the driver of the car to remember what UI paradigm a given application uses while driving is an unnecessary drain on the driver’s concentration, particularly on a system such as the Auto PC where the driver can easily switch between applications with a simple spoken command.
One of the main areas that I found fault with in the user interface was the lack of immediate feedback when pressing a key to issue a command to CoPilot. For instance, I would press a key to have CoPilot calculate a new route and often times it would appear to not be responding to my key press. Nothing changed on the screen, no audio prompt, but in reality it was busy calculating the route. Since there was no response I would think that I just pressed the "joystick" on the Clarion AutoPC incorrectly to generate an Enter, and I’d press Enter again. I would end up several keystrokes ahead of CoPilot. This would also happen when manually changing the map detail level while driving.
.CALLOUT If you are an Auto PC software developer
